[HN Gopher] IBM to acquire Confluent
___________________________________________________________________
IBM to acquire Confluent
Author : abd12
Score : 309 points
Date : 2025-12-08 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.confluent.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.confluent.io)
| jituyadav wrote:
| is it good or bad for confluent employees?
| rvz wrote:
| Both.
|
| IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package,
| and then let them go after the merger.
| vb-8448 wrote:
| They will get some money in the short term, but they better
| start looking for another job
|
| edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
| xocnad wrote:
| From experience, and to slightly refute the sibling replied,
| good for the confluent peeps that get flagged as being
| essential to the acquisition, they'll get a retention bonus of
| 100-300% of base pay spread over three years. The cutting of
| staff will begin likely in the 3-5 year time frame.
| abtinf wrote:
| It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations
| of the P&L owner of that division.
|
| IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally
| different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is
| completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
|
| My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a
| role where I could see the radically different motivations of
| divisions.
| paxys wrote:
| IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all
| shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will
| get a decent chunk of cash.
|
| Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the
| like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
|
| Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term,
| but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and
| that would be a good time for tenured employees to start
| planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will
| expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and
| be replaced by IBM execs.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| And sales teams will likely be forced to cross-sell IBM
| Products.
| pm90 wrote:
| IPO'd at 45, high of 90ish, sold at 30. It depends on the
| strike price for employees, but its not clear if its
| universally a good outcome.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a
| kafka alternative.
|
| I'll start.
|
| https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
| gooob wrote:
| wait what's wrong with kafka?
| itslennysfault wrote:
| What's wrong with kafka or what WILL BE wrong with kafka?
| Boxxed wrote:
| I was in the midst of writing a snarky reply and then
| realized my _actual_ issue with Kafka is that people reach
| for it way too often and use it in ways that don 't really
| make sense.
|
| Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what
| you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Ops here, Docker is packaging software.
|
| Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs
| trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their
| throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, docker is a software for packaging systems.
|
| The people distributing software should shut them damn up
| about how the rest of the system it runs in is
| configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full
| systems.)
|
| That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a
| problem.
| kevstev wrote:
| Nothing inherently wrong with the core product IMHO. The
| issue is more with Confluent, who have been constantly
| swinging from hot buzzword to hot buzzword for the last few
| years in search of growth. Confluent cloud is very expensive,
| and you still have to deal with a surprising amount of
| scaling headaches. I have people I consider friends that work
| there, so I don't want to go too deep into their various
| missteps, but the Kafka ecosystem has been largely stagnant
| outside of getting rid of Zookeeper and simplifying
| operations/deployment. There have been some decent quality of
| life fixes, but the platform is very expensive, yet if you
| are really all-in on Kafka, you would be insane to not get
| support from Confluent- it can break in surprising ways.
|
| So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with
| Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some
| issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform,
| still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the
| company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still
| charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and
| forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river
| when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the
| hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the
| shiny features discussed in the release notes.
|
| Redpanda has surpassed them from a technical quality
| perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the
| sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another. Kafka
| for example was built in a time of spinning rust hard disks,
| and expects to be run on general purpose compute nodes, where
| Redpanda will actually look at your hardware and optimize the
| number of threads its spawns for the box it is on- assuming
| it is going to be the only real app running there, which is
| true for anything but a toy deployment.
|
| This is my experience from running platform teams and being
| head of messaging at multiple companies.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification is helpful if
| you arent aware of how late stage capitalism works
| philipallstar wrote:
| Late stage of what?
| osigurdson wrote:
| https://nats.io
|
| Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://pulsar.apache.org/
| adamdecaf wrote:
| Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to
| Kafka for years.
|
| https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
| inesranzo wrote:
| Until Redpanda becomes enshittified.
|
| Sigh.
| spyspy wrote:
| `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
| alexjplant wrote:
| Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while
| (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and
| simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots.
| Genius, really.
| antonvs wrote:
| It's one of my favorite patterns, because it's the highest-
| impact, lowest-hanging fruit to fix in many systems that
| have hit serious scaling bottlenecks.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I've implemented a distributed worker system on top of this
| paradigm.
|
| I used ZMQ to connect nodes and the worker nodes would
| connect to an indexer/coordinator node that effectively did
| a `SELECT FROM ORDER BY ASC`.
|
| It's easier than you may think and the bits here ended up
| with probably < 1000 SLOC all told. -
| Coordinator node ingests from a SQL table - There
| is a discriminator key for each row in the table for
| ordering by stacking into an in-memory list-of-lists
| - Worker nodes are started with _n_ threads - Each
| thread sends a "ready" message to the coordinator and
| coordinator replies with a "work" message - On each
| cycle, the coordinator advances the pointer on the list,
| locks the list, and marks the first item in the child list
| as "pending" - When worker thread finishes, it
| sends a "completed" message to the coordinator and
| coordinator replies with another "work" message -
| Coordinator unlocks the list the work item originated from
| and dequeues the finished item. - When it reaches
| the end of the list, it cycles to the beginning of the list
| and starts over, skipping over any child lists marked as
| locked (has a pending work item)
|
| Effectively a distributed event loop with the events queued
| up via a simple SQL query.
|
| Dead simple design, extremely robust, very high throughput,
| very easy to scale workers both horizontally (more nodes)
| and vertically (more threads). ZMQ made it easy to connect
| the remote threads to the centralized coordinator. It was
| effectively "self balancing" because the workers would only
| re-queue their thread once it finished work. Very easy to
| manage, but did not have hot failovers since we kept the
| materialized, "2D" work queue in memory. Though very rarely
| did we have issues with this.
| ahoka wrote:
| Yeah, but that's like doing actual engineering. Instead
| you should just point to Kafka and say that it's going to
| make your horrible architecture scale magically. That's
| how the pros do it.
| tormeh wrote:
| Kafka isn't magic, but it's close. If a single-node
| solution like an SQL database can handle your load then
| why shouldn't you stick with SQL? Kafka is not for you.
| Kafka is for workloads that would DDoS Postgres.
| tormeh wrote:
| Apache Iggy seems like a project with a lot of momentum:
| https://github.com/apache/iggy
| linsomniac wrote:
| Do any of these alternatives make it easy to transition a
| system that is using Kafka Connectors and Avro?
| mistercheph wrote:
| Another genius move from International Business Machines!
| zkmon wrote:
| Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for
| the oldest problem - sending a message.
| slekker wrote:
| Erlang/OTP!
| spyspy wrote:
| I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations
| could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY
| timestamp ASC`
| devnull3 wrote:
| That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.
|
| Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number
| stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it
| asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
| fatal94 wrote:
| Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no
| processing volume.
|
| The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart
| and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of
| Kafka.
| devnull3 wrote:
| I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and
| google scale.
|
| I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on
| modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
| fatal94 wrote:
| What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But
| barring any very specific reason other than just not
| liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to
| be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers,
| the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-
| solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.
|
| Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message
| durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery
| guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop,
| reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers
| for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that
| point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the
| interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure
| than sqlite.
| fatal94 wrote:
| Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the
| features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested
| messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native
| pubsub system
|
| My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel
| solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially
| increases the complexity of my work and the learning
| curve for contributors.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Okay, then those people don't have to use Kafka. What is
| your point?
| NewJazz wrote:
| I was responding to someone who was responding to someone
| that wasn't using Kafka telling them to use Kafka. What's
| yours?
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| sqlite can do 40,000 transactions per second, that's
| going to be a lot more than 'homelab' (home lab).
|
| Not everything needs to be big and complicated.
| raverbashing wrote:
| "Any kind of scale" No, there's a long way of better and
| more straightforward solutions than the simple SELECT
|
| (SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50)
| for example
| Romario77 wrote:
| pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so
| you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db
| and dealing with complexities of having different time on
| different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes
| evident that Kafka is better in this regard.
|
| But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need
| streaming. But for pull based apps you design your
| architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than
| it is with DB, some things are harder.
| ahoka wrote:
| Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually
| pull messages.
| politelemon wrote:
| What is the reason for using Kafka then, sorry if I'm
| missing something fundamental.
| hawk_ wrote:
| Yes but try putting that on your CV.
| gooob wrote:
| wait what do you mean? what's wrong with kafka?
| pokstad wrote:
| Nothing wrong with Kafka. Time to build better abstractions on
| top of Kafka.
| avrionov wrote:
| What are the alternatives?
| esafak wrote:
| RedPanda, Iggy, Pulsar, Fluvio, NATS, etc.
| Zigurd wrote:
| ATProto? (aka AT protocol, ATP, Atmosphere...)
| jhickok wrote:
| "With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart
| data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI."
|
| https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
|
| I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
| exsomet wrote:
| Every time an executive says AI the number goes up.
| oedemis wrote:
| Streaming, EDA can solve lot of data challenges for enterprise
| AI use cases
| kitd wrote:
| Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A
| large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
| jhickok wrote:
| So the idea is sorta watching the wire of streaming data with
| autonomous agents or something like that?
| kitd wrote:
| Exactly. An agent may be acting on the contents of
| individual events, but also spotting trends and patterns in
| events, and intervening where needed/instructed.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| not for much longer
| charles_f wrote:
| They probably have cursor licenses
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As I read the release, it just sounded like "something
| something something data, something something something AI."
|
| AI is just the lastest buzzword. Everyone has it, because they
| have to. Don't look behind the curtain.
| scarmig wrote:
| You can double your company's value by saying it's an AI
| company. Easiest, simplest way to create value.
| Oras wrote:
| AI Agent for Kafka Consumer group
|
| /s
| egorfine wrote:
| Anything today has to contain the word "AI" otherwise it simply
| won't be considered.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's depressing how IBM always uses the same language with
| every single acquisition. They don't care about the actual
| tech, only the patents and the ability to resell it.
| udev4096 wrote:
| How is IBM still alive? Or is it trying to prove the same
| hadrien01 wrote:
| Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and
| HashiCorp turn out?
|
| For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution
| of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone
| and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's
| only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL
| and OpenShift at work.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| Gnome has stagnated significantly.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| If only it had stagnated around gnome 2.0.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Could that be due to increased popularity of KDE?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Gnome has stagnated significantly.
|
| GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK
| apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE
| and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
| shrubble wrote:
| The Gnome desktop that shipped with Solaris over two decades
| ago is just as useful, possibly more useful, as the tablet-
| oriented hamburger menu UI of today.
|
| Yes, two decades:
| https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-
| gnome-...
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I'm not sure this is bad? It's still maintained, and it isn't
| like there are frequent revolutions in UI design - if it
| works, it works.
|
| Slow and boring is a pretty nice place to be.
| jamespo wrote:
| Linux on the desktop isn't a lucrative business
| m4rtink wrote:
| Well, there is CentOS Stream:
|
| https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
|
| And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed
| there.
| bluedino wrote:
| It seems like most users got tired of the unknowns with
| CentOS and went to Alma/Rocky. Doesn't help that most third
| party software vendors also didn't bother to support it.
| this_user wrote:
| The argument has been made that the real value of RH lies in
| the people working there. And if IBM were to interfere too
| heavy-handedly, those people would just leave, and RH would
| become basically worthless.
| bityard wrote:
| Maybe that's how it should work, but it's not how it actually
| works.
|
| The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of
| the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and
| breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture
| with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty.
| You routinely find people doing more work than they really
| have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers,
| or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay)
| because they WANT to not because they have to.
|
| Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees
| this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers,
| marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to
| give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of
| company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After
| that, employee morale is HR's job.
|
| I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was
| profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went
| from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and
| supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space.
| As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we
| were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to
| conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs.
| Most of us eventually did the latter.
|
| Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM
| owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead
| of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on
| redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM
| meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.
| rmccue wrote:
| We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to
| hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-
| acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based
| pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically
| said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that
| migrating away would probably make sense for us.
|
| HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source
| licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-
| acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more
| attractive target for an exit).
| dangus wrote:
| In addition to this, I've noticed that OpenTofu is gaining
| much more interesting features and are actually acting upon
| long-requested functionality that HashiCorp has refused to
| implement (example: provider for_each in 1.9.0)
| mitchellh wrote:
| > (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive
| target for an exit).
|
| A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
| sethops1 wrote:
| Source: the guy the company was named after
| jen20 wrote:
| > were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit
|
| An "exit" from the public market?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Yes. They were burning the cash they raised from IPO as
| weren't profitable and no real path to profitability.
| Needed to find a buyer to take private as the other option
| - raise debt or print shares - wasn't going to happen as
| the share price had massively tanked and wasn't going to go
| up any time soon.
|
| Hopefully mitchellh will write a book about Hashicorp some
| time. Would be fascinating to read the inside take.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I migrated our company off Terraform to Pulumi as a direct
| result of the acquisition.
| tietjens wrote:
| How has it been? Sincere question.
| HashiCorps wrote:
| Former-Hashi employee here: there's a clear prioritization of
| enterprise products. So much so that I would not be surprised
| if they stopped supporting the Open Source projects entirely.
| That would be a big boost for the forks.
|
| Red Hat has far more autonomy. We are not structured the same.
|
| On the HR side -- many good people are leaving; new hires have
| to be on-site for 3 days and located in 4 "strategic" locations
| in the US.
| leeoniya wrote:
| previously...
|
| https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/
| enether wrote:
| Warpstream (by Confluent (an IBM company))
| elcapitan wrote:
| At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got
| fired for buying IBM.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| This isn't the old times, you can expect the opposite outcome
| these days.
| kevstev wrote:
| OP IMHO was obviously being sarcastic.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Fair.
| antonvs wrote:
| I know companies who would certainly have fired people for
| buying IBM, if they could have gone back in time to do so.
| b33f wrote:
| Maybe a good time to consider alternatives
| https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
| mliezun wrote:
| Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda
| earlier this year:
| https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...
| jerrinot wrote:
| Snowflake did not acquire RP after all.
| tapoxi wrote:
| We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use
| Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the
| price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed
| service.
|
| I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality
| wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite
| that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in
| the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
| dangoldin wrote:
| I led the engineering team of a large adtech company
| (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and
| we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor
| (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.
|
| RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to
| us since we were always so cost conscious but the
| complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was
| always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle
| both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with
| significantly better performance. We were pretty early
| customers but was a huge win for us.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| This. Using RP was like a breath of fresh air compared to the
| dread of Kafka (both local dev, and running a prod cluster)
| geodel wrote:
| This is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has
| finally found its natural home.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over
| other companies, but they consistently deliver low
| quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing
| the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual
| revenue this way?
|
| Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before
| chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with
| OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?
| They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent
| to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in
| datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
|
| I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just
| fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent
| now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert
| larger problems.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm pretty convinced there is a bell curve of "understanding
| what IBM does" where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely
| no idea.
|
| It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you
| think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares.
| It's like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see
| wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can't see how they
| are even solvent.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of
| talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put
| out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth.
| Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades
| ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to
| increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside
| of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and
| elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent
| to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-
| edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM
| breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many
| of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right
| leadership.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > but they certainly have the talent to take LLM
| breakthroughs and adapt
|
| I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade
| headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at
| the forefront. But they're not, and because of the
| organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at
| even getting close to there. Seems they know this
| themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the
| market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting
| for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of
| times before.
| pea wrote:
| It's a shame because people forget how good IBM research was
| back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people
| in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
| alienbaby wrote:
| There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the
| resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of
| ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.
| photon_lines wrote:
| Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been
| known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over
| a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is
| because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most
| of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who
| gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering
| usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge
| role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e.
| your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more
| time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't
| functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the
| overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to
| make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are
| the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't
| have any incentives to actually care about the product they
| produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every
| large company.
|
| Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson.
| Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in
| Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to
| compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the
| architecture of a general transformer which is capable of
| figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally
| understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and
| architecture here if you're curious:
| https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
| shadow28 wrote:
| > most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the
| CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while
| delivering usually pretty much nothing
|
| Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given
| that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of
| the original authors of Apache Kafka.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Not Confluent, IBM.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| More like we need psychologists to ask "why are companies
| still working with IBM's efficiencies 30 years after its
| peak?" The workers don't have to care but the businesses
| dealing with IBM should.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are
| they generating actual revenue this way?
|
| IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of
| consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
|
| They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big
| enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In
| fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees
| in India in then any other country.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| > Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt
| before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete
| with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house
| tools?
|
| Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what
| OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was
| essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is
| why it failed in literally every other domain.
|
| Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people,
| infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their
| product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in
| 2022+ like everyone else.
| kedean wrote:
| I don't think that would have gotten them much of anywhere.
| They already spent a decade trying to find markets for
| Watson to fit and generally failing at it. The problem with
| Watson wasn't technology, it was that it had no direction.
| sqircles wrote:
| There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM)
| making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed
| to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance
| going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the
| market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to
| millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
| rzerowan wrote:
| To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one
| of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some
| fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The
| Machine'.
|
| Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to
| market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than
| develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
| ericol wrote:
| > Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt
| before chatgpt. they built it in house
|
| I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get
| people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They
| "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I
| think every single person in the room knew they were full of
| it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions
| at the end.
|
| Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9
| Sidewinder.
| photon_lines wrote:
| If anyone is curious to see what Watson actually was you can
| find it here (it was nowhere near to a generalized large
| langue model -- mostly made for winning in Jeopardy): https:/
| /www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
| paxys wrote:
| Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a
| system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat
| stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all
| still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into
| a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The
| product itself was a massive failure because it had no real
| applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
| ericol wrote:
| I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to
| solve.
|
| I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the
| meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot.
|
| I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the
| documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any
| technical information")
| paxys wrote:
| Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a
| consulting company. They don't care about building great
| products. In fact building self-serve products will directly
| take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to
| be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was
| exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle
| and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single
| brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every
| acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies
| into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp &
| Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their
| cloud infra.
| signatoremo wrote:
| The service part you are likely referring to is now Kyldryl,
| a separate company. IBM now focus on software and cloud.
| There are still services but are much less prominent.
| drewda wrote:
| FWIW, both of your comments can have some truth:
|
| - the pure consultancy is another company now - the IBM
| portfolio of software "products" are being packaged in ways
| that emphasize professional services and elaborate
| licensing schemes (rather than turnkey software)
| alienbaby wrote:
| They gave up on watson about 18 months before llm's popped up,
| and they have simply just not got enough cash on hand to
| compete. While the big boys grew fantastically bigger over the
| past 15 years as cloud happened ibm fumbled time after time and
| shrank ever smaller, and is now desperately hoping it can stay
| relevant. but in the end they just haven't got the resources to
| compete on that stage anymore.
| rdtsc wrote:
| The recent interview with Arvind had the "grapes are too
| green, anyway" energy. They missed the train because they
| were licking their Watson wounds. Then sorta regretted it but
| it's too late.
|
| Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed
| at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to
| "hybrid" (cloud and local).
| sva_ wrote:
| If they hadn't sold the ThinkPad (and related) brands I would
| care.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| > they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services
| and products
|
| I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to
| ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies.
| They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out
| the development for another couple of years. And they work at
| leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They
| can't compete.
| Lammy wrote:
| > And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many
| coffee breaks.
|
| Ultra-based. We should all be so lucky.
| Xiol wrote:
| They will die happy knowing they did more than just create
| shareholder value.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I'll say this about IBM: because it's so old, it was the most
| diverse company I ever worked for- including age,
| nationality, race, sex, and any other category you can think
| of. Basically you had all types of people in all stages of
| life, not just young white workaholic tech-bros. The founders
| are long gone, so everyone there (including CEO) is a
| professional- meaning nobody has any kind of personal
| attachment to the company. We were all in the same boat, as
| it were. When your older coworker suddenly disappears due to
| a stroke, it puts things in perspective.
|
| The fast-paced startup is really the hack, combining the
| energy of youth with the ego-mania of their founders. Ask
| yourself, is it healthy?
|
| Anyway, IBM's customers tend to be other fortune 100s and
| governments- basically other similar organizations, and my
| experience was that we took care of them pretty well. The
| products were not pretty (no Steve Jobs-like person to
| enforce beauty), and rather complex due to all the enterprise
| requirements. But they were quite high quality, particularly
| the hardware.
| sva_ wrote:
| Sounds like the German government. Or probably other
| governments as well.
| supportengineer wrote:
| >> Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks
|
| Found my dream job :-)
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Have you seen Office Space? I'm sure it was based on IBM
| JensRantil wrote:
| In Sweden, IBM makes a shit tonne of money from SAP
| implementation consulting.
| Onavo wrote:
| They have some real money printers that most probably haven't
| heard of. IBM Maximo for example dominates some industries the
| way SAP and Salesforce does.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions.
| The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon
| phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they've
| joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like
| customer satisfaction and great products don't matter at all.
| Then they'll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling
| Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole
| purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core
| IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short
| to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and
| motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave
| and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time
| with the family. They'll meet often at the beginning to relive
| the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they
| went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But
| then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they'll
| find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as
| being "at the heart of AI infrastructure".
| coliveira wrote:
| IBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their
| clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to
| add new money flows.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-
| software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell
| to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen.
| No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on
| customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's
| all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you
| need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the
| customers.
| oersted wrote:
| Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the
| comments is getting close to a caricature now.
|
| The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious
| cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D
| they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm
| processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are
| doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and
| homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they
| were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of
| decades, it was not all fluff.
|
| Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not
| focused on building excellent products. But what they offer
| fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things
| they are doing on R&D are no joke.
| jen20 wrote:
| > not focused on building excellent products
|
| > a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke
|
| Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...
| ekianjo wrote:
| Sounds a lot like every very large company, in broader
| terms
| tgma wrote:
| IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a
| conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some
| enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM
| blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent
| efforts elsewhere.
|
| That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we
| know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm
| research division.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It
| is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.
|
| Agreed, like others, small startup I was with, we were
| acquired years ago and first advice from IBMers who'd
| been acquired was that IBM is like 1000 smaller
| companies.
| kedean wrote:
| > IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It
| is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things.
|
| This. Employees in the various sub-companies and
| divisions usually don't even know who most of the
| executive leadership is outside their little world. There
| is no cohesive "IBM" anymore, and I don't think there has
| been for a very long time.
| bdelmas wrote:
| Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are
| going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their
| last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much
| credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much
| they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM
| Watson?
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Scanning Tunneling Microscope, high-temperature
| superconductivity - 2 Nobel prize right there.
|
| Then laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, relational
| databases, UPC barcodes, DES, FFT, RISC, ...
|
| yeah, almost nothing. /s
|
| disclaimer: I work for IBM Research and I love every
| second of it.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| > The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and
| sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech.
|
| But they don't have production. How can they develop
| successfully without running silicon in a fab?
| zipy124 wrote:
| They sell the patents to manufacturers. They are an IP
| shop.
| cr125rider wrote:
| I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I've talked to
| there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force
| their old ways onto Hashicorp. We'll see. That one is still
| pretty new.
| gedy wrote:
| Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by
| bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just
| doesn't seem to happen.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe
| in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that
| is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation
| which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp
| believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for
| the software you use from them if you haven't already.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Executives will say anything to boost the next quarter
| results. After that they get rebooted and start again,
| and nothing they said before counts for anything.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to
| acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers
| come in and start the assimilation process.
| jerlam wrote:
| And in two years, the acquired management team all leaves
| like clockwork because they got their retention bonus.
| ljm wrote:
| For every incredible journey there is an equal and opposite
| lesson to be learned
| sausagefeet wrote:
| HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right?
| HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A
| bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary?
| Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was
| bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it
| went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for
| something like $6.5bn.
| apgwoz wrote:
| Not to mention HashiCorp bled talent before the acquisition
| was even announced (BUSL started it) and it didn't really
| stop as far as I'm aware.
| rdtsc wrote:
| I never quite figured out why IBM even bought them.
| Terraform? Wasn't there an open source clone by that point?
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| terraform and vault are both sticky products
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that
| Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.
| blcknight wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but
| they picked Arvind instead.
| robszumski wrote:
| exactly. standard move when you aren't going to get a
| second shot.
| pengaru wrote:
| My friends at RedHat were embracing similar forms of copium.
| By now they've all either moved on or are actively hand
| sitting while exploring options.
| hazmazlaz wrote:
| Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my
| breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and
| bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have
| to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the
| departures of the the acquired staff.
| rdtsc wrote:
| They tell that to every company they buy
| gnatman wrote:
| Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although
| involving other companies). Has there ever been an example
| where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions
| have actually improved rather than dissolved?
| Romario77 wrote:
| I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but
| successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube
| by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty
| successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just
| from business perspective).
|
| Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run
| almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch,
| Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
| chubot wrote:
| Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively
| separately, and it grew into something huge
| chubot wrote:
| Uh weird that I got downvotes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#
| His...
|
| _Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in
| October 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White_
|
| _Google acquired the company in July of [2005] for at
| least $50 million_
|
| It was ad-supported of course, but it's definitely not
| similar to IBM acquisitions
| macintux wrote:
| The Apple acquisition of NeXT has (only half-jokingly) been
| described as NeXT buying Apple with Apple's money. That's
| obviously an exceptionally rare case.
| gnatman wrote:
| I think I've seen people on here describe Google's
| acquisition of DoubleClick in similar terms--- or at least
| in the sense that DC's culture infected & somewhat replaced
| Google culture. I may be misremembering though.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose
| is to make sure nobody does anything
|
| I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was
| acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I
| decided I would never, _ever_ work for another company that
| used Lotus Notes.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Hasn't Notes been sluffed off to HCL?
| calgoo wrote:
| Not OP, they have not tried to sell it to us... yet at
| least. They are still trying to convince us that MyCloud is
| a amazing product.
| lisbbb wrote:
| The worst ever product: IBM FileNet! What an awful product.
| An acquisition, btw.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I
| actually liked it for some reason.
| acomjean wrote:
| Notes was pretty decent as a groupware/ nosql platform.
| Lotus script wasn't great. I might be biased because my
| first CS job was to write applications with it.
|
| It felt like they basically tacked on the email
| functionality to to Notes to sell it, but it always seemed
| kinda ok to me.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep.
|
| Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to
| Reply :)
| wetwater wrote:
| In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic
| prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative
| connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception
| the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards
| to who they allied with.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered
| before they themselves were taken into slavery during the
| fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the
| alliances they supported.
| catlover76 wrote:
| No empire lasts forever. Your sentence could apply to a lot
| of times and places in the pre-modern era
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I've heard IBM is really just an external government agency. If
| you look at it through the lens of being acquired by a
| government bureaucracy, then your explanation makes perfect
| sense. IBM is too entrenched to fail and too poorly run to be
| acquired.
| diob wrote:
| Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone
| for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each
| year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a
| different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.
|
| A lot of the successful projects at the original company are
| now dead.
|
| It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends
| they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt
| within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so
| you are out. It's super weird.
| tssva wrote:
| "It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract"
| ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to
| job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a
| month or so you are out. It's super weird."
|
| This is standard operating procedure at most
| consulting/professional services firms.
| newsclues wrote:
| Also the CIA
| echelon wrote:
| Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.
|
| GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its
| various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private
| companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited
| directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record
| of delivering good research-oriented results. They
| research and build prototypes around various
| capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.
|
| They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall
| through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The
| labs can even be competitive with one another, and the
| individual researchers might spend time split between
| labs.
|
| Academics as a service.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Yes, the bench sounds great but it is incredibly nerve-
| wracking and I never liked that aspect of consulting at
| all. Better to just go to zero pay and be a free agent and
| if the company finds you another gig, great, but no
| promises either way.
| Gilthoniel wrote:
| I don't know how many contracts IBM deals with, but the
| concept of a bench is very common in government contracting.
| It helps retain talent in an environment that's more volatile
| than a typical office. Good for the company to avoid brain
| drain and hiring overhead, good for the employee because it's
| a built-in safety net. Much better than your contract ending
| and immediately being out of a job, especially in today's
| market
| derefr wrote:
| I don't think they're objecting to the idea of a bench as
| an ultimate fallback; I think they're objecting to the idea
| that there isn't, during such "internal layoffs", a default
| automatic reassignment of all headcount to other teams. In
| such cases, you would only land on the bench if you refuse
| the automatic reassignment.
| system_exit wrote:
| Longer Bench allowed only for consultant with security
| clearance as those are such a hard thing to come by.
| General govt work, they just let you go like in commercial
| sector.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Those are the positives. The downside is that the sales
| team presents you with really lousy contract opportunities
| and you are pressured to accept one knowing it is a crap
| assignment that isn't helping your career growth. And you
| can be stuck on one of those for years!
| justin66 wrote:
| > They'll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days
| of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above
| and beyond for that important early customer.
|
| Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?
| samiv wrote:
| That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.
|
| It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall
| Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for
| R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to
| earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall
| Street and the company gets punished in the market.
|
| So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay
| dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then
| must be squeezed for margins.
|
| More here:
|
| https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.
|
| Dilbert's company buys an "artsy" startup (represented by a
| chap with a goatee and a ponytail).
|
| Dilbert comments something like "We get your energy and skill,
| and we provide ... an endless supply of 3-ring binders."
|
| To which the chap replies "I hear that if your name goes into a
| binder, you lose your soul."
| senderista wrote:
| I had friends that worked at a high-profile IBM acquisition a
| decade ago and this is exactly what happened.
| bgro wrote:
| IBM isn't really a tech company anymore. More of a legal
| trolling company that cosplays as tech.
|
| They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of
| both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening
| offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local
| economy.
|
| Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the
| contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to
| have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed
| in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this
| turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what
| in office means so can we offshore... Too much undefined
| confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep
| what the mayor paid us... Then they just shut down the office
| and move on to the next location.
|
| It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes
| for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn't be going on for decades as
| it has been.
|
| The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar
| except instead of leasing it's providing some sort of
| infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with
| good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later
| it's like well we have a US military contract that demands US
| employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we
| offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a
| single US employee's computer which is what the contract
| technically demands.
|
| Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this
| anyway, why not just give them direct access and we'll have a
| US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.
|
| Then they see how long they can get away with this until
| someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close
| to the technical contract they can get while threatening to
| abandon the whole thing at the same time.
|
| Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it
| seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to
| constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally
| protected status. So you'll get statistical analytics on ways
| to fire protected people based around the constant performance
| reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of
| protected people can be removed without statistically breaking
| the law. Whatever that algorithm is.
|
| That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also
| goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like
| if old people can't relocate as easily then hopping offices and
| forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be
| eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams
| and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up
| reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some
| made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some
| other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early
| despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly
| because of tax trolling.
|
| I don't know how IBM still exists because from my perspective
| it's pretty clear they're breaking or at best on razor thin
| gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could
| break.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| I'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The
| internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part
| it's business as usual.
|
| I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is
| trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to
| prioritize the right work so far.
|
| I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock
| purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock
| has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.
|
| FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style
| on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly
| recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.
| bonzini wrote:
| > FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management
| style on acquisitions in years past
|
| Definitely wasn't like that for Red Hat. We had a CFO with an
| IBM past which was a really nice guy and never ever felt like
| he was parachutes from IBM.
|
| Now after 6 years legal, HR and finance will move to IBM
| starting next January; but my perspective from engineering is
| that after the acquisition it's been and remains business as
| usual.
|
| I have no idea how it was for Hashicorp.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Haven't heard a damn thing about "RedHat" in years, though.
| It's dead as far as Linux distros go. I'm sure it's used in
| the IBM-o-sphere, but I'm just not around that at all.
| bonzini wrote:
| Well I am not sure what other commercial distros you
| consider to be alive, but Red Hat makes Canonical's
| yearly revenue in a couple weeks.
|
| Outside IBM land, Meta runs on a CentOS Stream fork.
| viccis wrote:
| Yep, this is a classic acquisition story. You go from a hungry
| company out there to fight to succeed and join a big corp where
| most projects are just endless series of meetings people have
| about what they want to do without any real timeline or
| immediate plan to start.
|
| The worst is when your sales team (and all of its super
| valuable institutional knowledge of your specific market) are
| cut, and all your management is laid off so that the new corp's
| managers (who have embedded themselves into the corporate
| bureaucracy like a trichinosis worm) can treat all your teams
| as free headcount.
|
| Soon, your company, which was acquired for growth, can't do
| anything and turns into an albatross around the new corp's
| neck. So the layoffs begin.
| AMerrit wrote:
| I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a
| good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely
| because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely
| left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in
| quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton
| crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the
| main product, every other part of the original company has been
| picked clean.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an
| employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in
| the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to
| increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or
| something that had some form of employee directory.
| framebit wrote:
| Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics
| rhyme "PC" with "easy."
| jhallenworld wrote:
| That's awesome. Before ~2007 they allowed you to use
| open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers. A
| friend of mine and I used it to make a bot: if you
| sametimed me, you got Zork.
|
| It reminds me of another IBM IT rule: they wanted your
| chat history (and email) older than two years to be all
| deleted for legal liability reasons. It was important to
| save your sametime chat history (an XML file) and export
| your email periodically if you wanted to keep this stuff.
|
| This was actually better than Slack in one way- you could
| grep the files for things, and not have to rely on search
| within the tool.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| This is what is happening with red hat also?
| jhallenworld wrote:
| >mind boggling Byzantine rules
|
| Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of
| (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your
| personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of
| all the development and test servers of the original company,
| then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS
| (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the
| end-point asset manager, and has up to date OS patches, that
| the DASD is encrypted, and you must periodically show physical
| proof that the asset still exists and indicate where it's
| located- photos of assets tags or whatever. It will be your
| responsibility to dispose of the asset (with all associated
| paperwork) at the end of its life.
|
| It helps if such machines are not actually on the 9. network,
| or are behind an internal firewall (then they don't care about
| the security compliance as much).
| numbsafari wrote:
| ... isn't this... what you should be doing already?
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Probably, but now it's going to be formalized and will
| entail a lot of paperwork (manual entry on many very badly
| written JAVA-based CRUD applications). Sure, these things
| are all good ideas, but trust me, they have all been
| overthought. Do you want this to be your job?
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > ... isn't this... what you should be doing already?
|
| I still "own" (i.e. I'm the sole user with a root access
| and can install OS of my choosing) an old machine from the
| days before everything moved to a cloud and guess no one
| from IT has got to decommission it yet. I'm have no idea
| where it is located (besides knowing which office it is
| assigned to), never saw it, no way in hell am going to
| attach any tags and waste my time to install enterprise
| spyware on it or manually encrypt it's data. Do engineers
| do that for development servers on your job? If yes, name
| and shame!
| ljm wrote:
| This feels like the kind of post you can only write with sombre
| experience.
| shrubble wrote:
| IBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom
| has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must
| be 1000s of such customers.
| theta_d wrote:
| I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to
| connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN
| account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't
| connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even
| assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my
| initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the
| details.
|
| It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance.
| This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I
| remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
| askafriend wrote:
| Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?
| Reubachi wrote:
| I imagine that's done via JIRA tcket/IT before onboarding.
|
| So if they somehow can get past initial device
| deployment/user account logon, and get other resources IE;
| slack....well that speaks to how difficult/pointless it would
| be to get proper VPN/Jira access.
| theta_d wrote:
| I believe it was an ancient ServiceNow incantation that all
| the current employees couldn't seem to hunt down.
| esafak wrote:
| You'd have to be able to find the person to do that first
| hehe!
| ecshafer wrote:
| What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big,
| older companies, are just so messed up that its just not
| worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the
| specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is
| that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting
| in jira might literally be like a month of work.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I've worked for S&P Global, so pretty large. If you don't
| have an account that you need, then you need to be
| tenacious, which of course is super annoying. If you don't
| have an account on a system you should, it's 100% on you
| after a while.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I work for a company that has so much bureaucracy and silos
| that teams maintain wiki pages with links and routing on how
| to create tickets for specific tasks and wether there is a
| specific mandatory information needed in order to not have
| your ticket just closed as incomplete without an explanation.
|
| Sometimes a team unilaterally decide to change the process,
| info is sent to a random number of mailbox/managers who may
| fail to pass the info. Some entire teams just put themselves
| in away status 24/7 and do not respond to direct messages.
|
| So yes I can believe his story. Sometimes in these kind of
| companies you just don't know who and how to ask for
| something and you just hope someone knows someone who might
| know.
| Zigurd wrote:
| On consulting engagements, 0% of the time are Jira and git
| provisioned correctly for an outside consultant. I used to be
| appalled at being paid for two or three days of waiting for
| the IT guy to fix this. Now I use the time to find cleaning
| supplies and deep clean my cubicle and chair. People do look
| at me funny, but I feel better not just sitting there
| reading.
| theta_d wrote:
| I did, multiple times. I was a contractor. I was the only one
| on my team of contractors whose account was screwed up. There
| seemed to be no priority to do anything there. One of many
| many reasons I left when I could.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I had a similar thing happen to me with a huge company as a
| contractor. I couldn't work for 3 weeks due to a combination
| of login issues and permissions settings. Couldn't file a
| ticket and no one was really sure who to call/ask. Finally a
| director caught wind of it and knew who to talk to.
| rwmj wrote:
| How is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at
| least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)
| orthoxerox wrote:
| If you're serious, Kafka is a topic-centric message bus.
| Everything is a topic, not a queue, and its internals are
| optimized to achieve very quick at-least-once delivery.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Could anyone please explain what IBM is even doing these days?
| Where revenue is coming from?
| stuff4ben wrote:
| it's a public company, read the quarterly reports
| hjaveed wrote:
| good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of
| the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
| gtirloni wrote:
| If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die (a
| bit unfair though), IBM is the equivalent for for-profit
| companies.
| deniscoady wrote:
| _If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die
| ..._
|
| I can't think of a better place for longevity of open source
| projects than Apache (maybe I'm out of the loop?).
|
| Compare it to the Linux Foundation where everything is a single
| commercial vendor sponsored project. At lease Apache requires
| independent governance and a diverse ecosystem before the
| project graduates.
|
| Am I missing something with the Apache Foundation?
| belter wrote:
| This is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence
| will strengthen IBM's artificial intelligence portfolio..."
|
| Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| Near-Real-time inference is a hot thing these days with Apache
| Flink, which is commercially supported by Confluent (not
| Confluence)
| 9dev wrote:
| Haven't got the memo? Everything computing is AI now. If you
| want to sell it, that is.
| rileymichael wrote:
| ibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building
| on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming
| increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the
| kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs
| / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the
| result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the
| limitations..
|
| anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're
| considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else
| is in the game
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| And two years prior IBM acquired Ahana (PrestoDB SaaS). Totally
| agree that businesses need to much more carefully assess the
| risks of moving to these hosted open source platforms. Reminds
| me of when over a decade ago companies moved to Snowflake for
| their DWs because "our Teradata costs are out of control".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some market reaction
|
| _Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition
| deal_
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html
| jarym wrote:
| Let the Bluewashing begin. Everything will be WebSphere-first and
| then WebSphere-only.
| jcims wrote:
| IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with
| conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
| umanwizard wrote:
| What does this mean?
| edm0nd wrote:
| I read it as purposely making the booth unattractive or
| bland? not sure either haha
| Zigurd wrote:
| It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like
| things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like
| IBM evolve into Computer Associates.
| semessier wrote:
| the price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective
| purplezooey wrote:
| Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so
| much better than MapR
| btown wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188 and
| https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-...
| have some context on MapR's demise.
|
| IMO they were simultaneously worse situated for near-real-time
| stream processing and for S3-esque cloud storage, areas Kafka
| and Confluent excelled.
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